I Garden, Therefore I am Perfectly Sane

PLUS – A QUITE MARVELLOUS NEW BUTTERFLY

(The butterfly ‘reveal’ follows the text … stick with it, it’s worth scrolling down to see the photo).

Browsing through the garden books shelves of my office at home, I surfaced a book by Anna Pavord that I must have purchased 30 years ago. It’s called “Gardening Companion” and was published by Chatto & Windus in 1992. She is very sound on garden matters. As the saying has it, she knows her stuff. Anyway, randomly dipping into a chapter, I happened upon a section from which I took the title of today’s newsletter … here are some snippets from the book that I wanted to share.

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You don't find a lot about gardening in the annals of psychology or psychiatry. Nothing in fact. My own theory about this (you have to have a theory in this line of business) is that the act of gardening itself is what keeps you out of the hands of the shrinks.

I have been looking for an answer to the question: Why do we garden? At the heart of it all, as far as I am concerned, is the feeling that you are abandoning a timetable constructed around dentist's appointments, car services and the possible arrival of trains, to plunge headlong into a different one, an immense and inexorable one entirely outside your control. When I wander out of the back door to do some casual gardening I do not say, 'Fancy that. I am part of the great diurnal round.' I just get on with the weeding. But while you are there, idly looking at the silhouette of the mahonia in the dusk and the sun sets round you, bleeding across the sky with the savage intensity that only happens on winter afternoons, you feel a whole lot better than you do inside. Colder, but better. Or am I a masochist? Too much amateur psychology is bad for you.

(However) I seem never to have hit that dewy, straw-hatted stratum of gardening that goes on in magazines. Muck-carting is a more likely pastime than dead-heading.

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You will have to track down a copy of the book should you want to read more. It’s a fine read, most enjoyable and not really about technical gardening, more some organized “thoughts”. Anyway, the question raised was Why do we garden? I have gardened for so long it’s hard to know the answer to that – just something we do, like having a cup of tea first thing in the morning. Hard to imagine a life without even a small bit of earth to potter in and attract bees and birds to.

Back in the 1950s, I would follow my grandfather around his large Somerset garden, trying to help. I especially enjoyed helping to pick the raspberries because I could eat as many as I wished. He showed me how to double dig the potato beds and tie up the runner beans on canes, so I got a taste of gardening jobs early. I think we have always had a bit of a garden to enjoy. From what she has told me, J’s smaller years were similar. Our last English garden before coming to Canada in 1998 was quite large with lawn, flower borders, a large vegetable patch, fruit of all sorts, a developing orchard and some espaliered fruit trees. We even had bee-hives.

Then we came to Montreal and decided gardening was behind us – new country, new culture, new people and thousands of square miles of forest full of bears to explore. We assumed that we would have no time for gardening.

Inevitably, we found spare hours at weekend and evenings being filled by tweaking this and planting that. I dug a pond with a waterfall, and before we knew it, there we were gardening again. At first, a fairly formal garden around a lawn, but then we got the bug for native plant and wildlife gardening. The lawn was replaced in its entirety and today is full of head high Rudbeckia, Echinacea, Obedient Plants, Sanguinaria, Golden Rod, many species of Asters and numerous dogwood bushes, buzzing furiously with bees, filtered through by butterflies and moths. A recent rough census found around 50 native plant species thriving. We are twittered at by birds in the bushes, at the feeders and bathing in the waterfall. In August, it’s a blaze of colour and wildlife activity. There are tomatoes and peppers and salad crops and kale. We are gardening with a vengeance and have probably never been so content with what we are doing.

So, back to the question, why are we gardening?

• Well, because we enjoy it of course.

• Because it keeps us interested, challenged and above all, fit.

• Because it is creative.

• Because it supports wildlife on our doorstep with flowers and insects and a list of 120 species of birds (about 80 in any given year)

• Because it is something we can do together – and that is always important.

• Because, if we did not have a garden, what on earth would we find to do that would keep us so happy and contented?

An article I recently read, written by a psychologist says “More than just keen observers of time, gardeners are real-life Time Lords, able to speed up time by working in the garden, and, later, to slow it right down by sitting back and surveying the fruits and flowers of their labour. Some gardeners are even able to step out of time altogether, working year round to create Arcadian moments of perfection.” Not totally sure about Arcadian moments of perfection, but we are pleased with the way things are working out – a never-ending project.

That will do to be going on with. After all:

“I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time.” Blaise Pascal, 1657

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Flame-rim Tortoiseshell Butterfly

This Sunday post was intended to be relatively brief (see above), and then this gorgeous butterfly visited the garden on Friday afternoon and settled invitingly on a stand of Snakeroot flowers. Usually, at this point, I dash indoors for the camera and the visitor is long gone two minutes later, but this time it was so enamoured of the flowers it had found that it hung around waiting for me to leave. I was intrigued, it looked somehow familiar, but I was sure I had not seen it before. So – several photographs and a session with a butterfly key ensued, ID later confirmed by another user in iNaturalist.

A Flame-rim Tortoiseshell Butterfly (Aglais milberti) – also known as Milbert’s Butterfly

Two hatches per year. Eggs laid on and caterpillars feed on nettles and clear weed, the second of which grows well hereabouts. The second brood adults hibernate in clusters over winter. The only resident species in this genus in North America. Normal habitat is wet areas near woodlands, moist pastures, marshes, woodland trails and roads … perhaps seen this year because of the high rainfall we have had during the summer.

Very happy with this addition to my personal life list and a new entry on the garden list. It was very pleased to have found the Snakeroot flowers and stayed around as long its nerve would permit – I think my presence made it nervous.

There has been a controversy regarding this species actual genus, as some consider it to be nymphalis, with both of them being unified at one point of time. It is even said that butterflies of the Aglais genus have a brighter hue. And Milbert? The species name milberti originated from the name of a friend of Jean-Baptiste Godart, the entomologist who discovered the species - whether this was his only claim to fame I cannot discover. Although commonly called Milbif onert’s Tortoiseshell I consider that to be an unhelpful common name as it tells you nothing about the species characteristics and anyway, there is a growing move to find alternatives to species common names that use a person ... if inly because half of them seem, a century on, to have been slave owners or rapacious capitalists or worse sorts of politically unsound people that need to be removed from public contact. There have been a lot of renaming discussions in recent years because of that.

🪶 The next newsletter is for the bird people - come back on Thursday to learn about the rumbunctious gang gathering in the garden

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